Titans: Everything Else You Always Wanted to Know

by 2012-09-20 05:11

In his first article on how to fly titans, veteran Pandemic Legion supercapital pilot and all-round civilised poster Hatsumi showed you how to fit your dream boat, how to work the buttons, and what to do with it when Time Dilation reduces you to a glacial crawl. This time, he discusses how to kill things and, first, what to do when it all starts to go horribly wrong.

U DUN GOOFED M8 - A GUIDEBOOK ON NAVIGATING THE DIRE STRAITS

Yep, the shit hit the fan. No clue who threw it there or why, but that doesn't matter because everyone is covered in it and your titan is shooting at things but most importantly getting shot at. Hopefully you are in a tank fit (or in the process of refitting, pronto) and you've got friends backing you up.

Take a moment and look at what's happening:

Q) Are they mostly subcaps?

A) You're about to get neuted. Since the nerf to blap titans, clearing tackle isn't something you can easily do by yourself anymore; anything with a signature radius under 1000m2 takes a massively reduced amount of damage from your turrets. To combat neuts, there really are only two ways: get cap from a friendly ship through energy transfers or use some *GASP* capacitor boosters. Wait. wat.. WHAT? CAP BOOSTERS? Yes, I know this sounds dumb, but you get more cap/s out of two officer cap boosters pumping navy 800s than you get from super high meta and super expensive cap rechargers. And between your CHA and cargo hold.... you can literally keep thousands of charges. Them alone won't break 200 neuting ships, but you'll at least be able to cycle your hardeners to lessen the damage. (this is what I meant in the "see later" comment with regards to cap earlier.)

Are you alone? Consider lightning a cyno from the titan : it takes less time than bringing another ship down there and a supercapital is a lot more resilient than any other cyno ship could be if you're bringing backup.

Q) Are they supercarriers?

A) Without backup, you're dead. With backup, consider refitting a smartbomb. The higher meta ones have the range to hurt FBs, but it'll take a while to kill them. Given time, they'll either lose them or have to pull them back for repairs. A SC does 8k dps (10k for the Nyx), which amounts to roughly 3 meta2 CRARs assuming omni damage. If you notice they're mostly using one or two damage types, refit hardeners to counter that. Unless I'm sorely mistaken it takes three bombing runs to clear fighter bombers.

Q) Are they other titans?

A) Hostile titans pose a bigger threat than SCs despite their lower dps, if only because they have the ability to volley through your tank. For the record, to alpha volley a a tanked Aeon, it takes 19 titans coordinating. Consider refitting your hardeners to mainly thermic and EM for the ever so common Avatars and Erebusesisesi, and OVERHEAT. Just watch out for the stray Rags and Levis, they're rare but still exist. Make a mental note of the time at which they fired their doomsdays to predict when they'll fire again. Ten minutes real time is the normal delay, but keep in mind that most if not all super fights are heavily tidied.

Q) Are they suicide dreads?

If they're suicide dreads, chances are someone's gonna die and without good and quick backup, it's gonna be you. These can do upwards of 13k dps (pimped out Moros can reach a theoretical 18k) and most of the time they don't give two shits about what happens to them as long as you die. Get some emergency triage archons and Aeons/Nyxes to rep you up and help you try to clear them out. Only DD if you're sure to die anyways, or believe you can get backup within 60seconds. 20-30 dreads firing 12-13k dps at you for a minute straight hurts. A lot. And they're insured. You aren't.

4 Doing Drive-bys: Killing Scrubs Like They Were 2PAC

"The ultimate expression of God's Divine wrath, this weapon projects a beam of the Lord's holy light, designed to put sinners in their proper place." (Judgement superweapon description)

Badass, huh? As long as the sinner is a Freighter, Jump Freighter, Carrier, Supercarrier, Dreadnought, Titan or Rorqual, at least. Freighters, JFs and Rorquals are pretty much guaranteed to die in one activation. Carriers and Dreads can survive if they're well fit and tanked (CCC carriers die, trimarked archons live almost everytime), Supercaps require ~20 coordinated DDs to kill in one blow, and Titans probably 40 something. Contrary to popular belief, firing a DD doesn't require that much cap. 18.624%, to be precise.

Doing a drive-by is basically just warping in (or jumping in), locking, shooting your load and getting away asap, before you get caught with your pants down and taken out for dinner. This is generally risky business, as you're usually left sitting on a station, gate or other potentially unfriendly area for a whole minute, only relying on the initial element of surprise to get away. "A minute you say? But the module description says you're only immobile for 30 seconds!" Yes, that's true. HOWEVER! You have to lock the target (only a quick deal on other supercapitals, most caps get locked in 6-7 seconds with a pair of scan res scripted faction sebos) and once you can move again, you have to deal with your super giant ass being slow as hell to align and warp out. You have a MWD fitted, right? Right That's 20seconds minimum.

Keep in mind that beween the module activation and the damage from the DD applying, it takes 10 seconds (9 seconds officially, plus 1 second for the server tick to register the command), so make sure that what you want to blap can't go anywhere, either from being tackled, aggressed on a station, whatever. Oh yeah, DDs don't work in lowsec, so don't even try.